Nvidia to Pay Royalties to Rambus; Litigation Not Over

Rambus and Nvidia agreed to sign a patent license on Friday, giving Nvidia access to the Rambus memory-controller patents in exchange for royalties.

Rambus and Nvidia agreed to sign a patent license on Friday, giving Nvidia access to the Rambus memory-controller patents in exchange for royalties.

The terms are consistent with the license that Rambus has offered in cooperation with the European Comission: a 1 percent royalty rate for SDR memory controllers, and a 2 percent royalty rate for other memory controllers, including DDR, DDR2, DDR3, LPDDR, LPDDR2, GDDR2, GDDR3, GDDR4, and portions of GDDR5 memory controllers.

Nvidia did not license any patents to Rambus, the companies said.

Interestingly, the two companies said that the agreement did not end the outstanding litigation between the two companies, nor released any liability. Nvidia agreed to pay a bond of 2.65 percent to allow its GeForce, Quadro, nForce, Tesla and Tegra be shipped, after the U.S. International Trade Commission agreed that they infringed Rambus patents. (That would equate to about a $12 premium on the price of a GeForce GTX 480, Nvidia's top-of-the line desktop graphics card, which costs about $459.99.)

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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